The simple fact is, the men with guns can always coerce you. 'Fixing money because governments suck' is never going to work.
Nearly anywhere in the Western world, one can find highly illegal drugs with no more than a few phone calls. Cryptocurrency is far easier to smuggle and conceal than cannabis. If governments have repeatedly proven hilariously incompetent at the War on Drugs, why would we possibly expect any government to be capable of stomping out cryptocurrency by its citizenry?
Even if cryptocurrencies weren't completely stomped out, shouting "Bitcoin lives!" from a prison cell wouldn't be that helpful to the person serving the sentence. The "many-headed hydra" isn't much use to the severed heads.
Moreover I don't think the failure of the "War on Drugs" provides a relevant example. The inability of the government to stamp out illegal drugs doesn't indicate that it would be a reasonable risk for many (or most) people to maintain their wealth in cryptocurrencies, if cryptocurrencies were to become illegal.
This assumes that demand is going to remain the same while supply goes down. More likely the demand goes to near-zero when the legitimate investors exit the market.
There's enough narcos, mafia and other random citizens with enough distain for the law to fight over the remaining (5% Who knows) of remaining bitcoin on the black market after a worldwide ban that maybe it will still have some sort of demand.
Also, what classifys a crypto currency? This is one of the biggest problems with a blanket ban. If it is a POA chain run by a centralized entity for use within a video-game, but also has real world value for 'Items' a crypto? What happens if no one uses that currency for items, but instead trades it on an open exchange for USD and other FIAT. Is that banned too? It's too obscure a concept at this point for a real ban to every really work.
If 95% of the value is gone, and with it probably 95% of miners, the whole system is vulnerable to attacks and could easily go into a death spiral for the remaining 5% of the value.
https://law.stanford.edu/press/is-bitcoin-protected-as-speec...
Nearly anywhere in the world one can go to prison for life for possessing enough of those highly illegal drugs.
Why would the average person risk their freedom over cryptocurrency? If you convert the digital asset into a physical asset enough times or for nice enough goods, EVENTUALLY someone is going to ask where the money came from.
You're also making a pretty bold assumption that the governments actually want drugs stamped out. I don't think that has EVER been the case, that's just been the story. It's used as a means of suppressing people of color and poor people. When was the last time you heard of a Wall Street banker going to prison for coke?
That's really trying to frame the world through a lens of racial or class bias. It's not the reality. You're the one making the unsubstantiated bold claim here.
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
It is the reality.
The war on drugs was literally a war on black people and "hippies" by the admission of Nixon's domestic policy chief. So no, I'm not making unsubstantiated claims.
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11278760/war-on-drugs-racism-n...
>At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
That motive just cannot explain the last fifty years of the war on drugs. The reality must be much more complex.
Yes. The incarceration rates reflect it. Blacks are DISPROPORTIANATELY penalized by drug offenses, it's not even close.
I mean I agree about the incarceration rates, but that's also a complex topic and can't be dismissed as "racism".
But it has nothing to do with what I said. I made an argument and you responded "because racism". You may as well have said "potato".
Unless you've got something more than that I'll assume you're arguing in bad faith.
Do you think they're all racist and trying to oppress people of color or do you think maybe there's something else to it?
It's pretty obvious that can't be true right? Surely we can agree on that?
I mean sure, some of the domestic American situation is like that. The disparate penalties for cocaine and crack cocaine come to mind.
Reminds me a bit of alcohol prohibition. Alcohol consumption was through the roof. It was a real social problem. The weight of the "solution" was borne on the backs of the working class persecuted by the law and people who got gunned down in mob violence. While the middle class got booze prescribed by their doctors, and the elites were of course above the law. But that wasn't exactly the intent of the temperance movement.
A lot of perfectly intelligent, worldly and moral people support some degree of drug criminalization because they believe they're more harmful than the prohibition side effects. No conspiracy there.
Re: Venezuela - Libya would be an example where the fragile relationship between economic resources and guns can go very bad for leadership. Same for France right before the revolution and Russia's tsar Nick's family.
Venezuela for sure is in a fragile state, and Maduro has the sword of Damocles over his head. Do you think Western politicians and "elites" have the stomach to handle that pressure? I don't.
You could never have crypto in an anarchist vacuum.
This seems like a strawman to me? You can be for replacing the world's monetary system with cryptocurrency, and still believe in having a government with police, roads, and schools.
Those people discount just how much underlying social stability matters, and how meaningless an executable contract would be in a violent environment.
>Those people discount just how much underlying social stability matters, and how meaningless an executable contract would be in a violent environment.
How did we go from "let's use smart contracts to enforce business contracts, rather than the courts", to "abolish the entire justice system"?
No one is incentivized to grease the gears of a democratic society. Nobody wants to pay taxes. But they are necessary to establish an environment of innovation, etc (to a point).
There's a reason the dark ages were called the dark ages.
That being said, I'd be curious to here pro-crypto arguments from someone “believ[ing] in having a government with police, roads, and schools”. This is especially interesting to me, because “school” appears in this list.
[1] which cannot really be qualified as anarchists IMHO, but that's another topic.
Is there something inherently contradictory between "a government should collect taxes and provide police, roads, and schools", and "the government shouldn't be entrusted with the ability to print money and/or dictate monetary policy"?
BTW, in most if not all developed economies, the government don't control the monetary policies, the central banks do (and they are independent from governments, by design because people against government intervention made it this way).
If you are rich and have 1000 BTC in various wallets, able to avoid capital controls, etc... why would you pay the 45% biden cap gains? Thus society loses out and rich whales get to hodl
Tax evasion, in the individual style you describe, can be detected in lifestyle choices and consumer habits. Generally, the burden is on you to explain how you've been able to spend more than your official tax records report.
Thus it will increase the problem of people benefitting from society but not paying back into society. Taking resources that would never be able to grow in a vacuum.
It's also unknown what the future holds in regard to effective tracing capabilities, retroactively, by law enforcement and agencies.
My view is based on crypto and society ‘as is’ today. I would have to imagine a different society, with a radical adoption of crypto, to support your argument. But I would if that was the case.
This seems a little non-obvious to me. Can you expand a bit on why?
It's not the government vs. a bunch of fringe individuals at this point.
But I'm saying that crypto is built on the stability and infrastructure that was created by fairly well-run and well-intentioned centralized govs etc.
That's a trivially true statement for anything that exists at all.
200 years ago you could have said "democracy is built on the infrastructure that was created by monarchies". Ok. So what? That doesn't ipso facto delegitimize the potential of democracy as a viable alternative to monarchy, and history would have proven you wrong.
Democracy is self-sustaining. Crypto is not self-sustaining, it requires institutions to be able to exist and provide the stability and infrastructure for it to exist.
Crypto detracts from gov/institutions because it enables individual actors to hold on to "their" wealth more easily and evade paying back into the system that allows the wealth to thrive in the beginning.
Your simplistic argument is ignoring the negatives of purely "individual actors"
Let's give a concrete example. Say it takes $10M to house the homeless in SF. One marc benioff (or, better yet, a few + tens of thousands of individuals, but not necessarily all) can step up and cover the cost and the rest of the greedy billionaires in SF can do what they want. Whereas if only the city takes care of it, then you could be hosed.
By its very nature if you want robust social services, you should build a voluntary system because that's not going to have a single point of failure.
Indeed your statement belies a serious level of projection: you're ignoring the negatives of a state run solution.
Bad times makes things reach a point they cannot be contained anymore, it doesn’t matter how big your backing seemed to be during the good times.
How do they build/maintain power/network lines between villages, cities, satellite connections, underwater fiber routes?
Thus if everybody locks in their "wealth" with crypto, none of it would go to the commmons - these commons are used to run the crypto network.
Also, crypto wealth isn't 'Locked'. I can buy synthetic assets with my crypto with a guarantee that an equal amount of stock has been purchased. I can bond or trade my tokens for different cryptos to be developed that may have fecundity in supply chain, banking, pay for compute time, store, read and write to files, etc. None of that seems 'Locked' and if you think none of that goes to the commons than AWS, all the world banks, financial software, google and pretty much every other tech companies are 'locking wealth away'.
I'm not sure if i entirely agree with this next sentiment eithier but it's one that i've heard and i find interesting.
The first capitalist was the caveman1 who dug a hole in a wall to protect him from the elements. The worlds first socialist was the caveman2 that demanded caveman1 share or give over the cave, since he also had a right to the products of his labor.
My general sentiment is, fix government. Serious capitalists in the US need to work on serious policy; housing market and healthcare deregulation, not figuring out how to bury their digital gold.
A happy and productive population is much less likely to care about your wealth.
private keys are stored in wallets, while the utxo set is stored on thousands of full nodes all over the world.
If things are bad enough that they block your accounts I'm fairly sure you wouldn't be able to take a plane anyway.
You fly to a different country. It handles the finance side of things, nobody expects bitcoin to your bodyguard.
>If things are bad enough that they block your accounts I'm fairly sure you wouldn't be able to take a plane anyway.
While it's entirely possible that you land in a situation where your bank accounts are frozen and can't get on a plane, I can think of plenty of situations where only your accounts are frozen.
North korea? Yeah, i’m sure they’ll just let you offload your BTC and live the high life.
What type of scenario are we talking about here? It sounds like you're assuming that the person fleeing the country did some sort of Bad Thing and would be wanted in every country, but it would be easily someone getting on the bad side of the regime eg. jack ma or alexey navalny.